Many of the media editing applications available today provide numerous different tools for editing media items. Different editing tools have different user interface (UI) items such as sliders, knobs, text boxes, etc., for controlling various edits to media items. With so many tools, the graphical user interface (GUI) of the media editing application may be very crowded and overwhelming to the novice user. In addition, users typically interact with the editing tools by using a cursor to select, click, and drag UI items and/or media items. Thus, the editing controls for editing media clips may be cumbersome, tedious, and time-consuming to use because some operations allow one item or object may be interacted with at a time.